#6
We do more musical history and hijinks.
Will the fun never end?
July 1948 - King 721 - Glow Worm/It's Bloody War
If you are familiar at all with this song it may be the Mills Brothers version from 1952 with the Johnny Mercer lyrics. If you're like me, maybe it's the Spike Jones version. (the first record I ever listened to regularly as a child was Spike Jones. It explains my tastes a lot, I suppose)
But it's origins are once again all the way back to a 1902 German operetta by Paul Lincke whence it was known as "Glühwürmchen" before being translated and used in a 1909 American Musical "The Girl Behind the Counter"
I'll take the H & J version myself. You can foxtrot like a mofo to it.
The B side doesn't quite go back as far. Jimmie Yates' Boll Weevils take the first stab at "It's Bloody War" in 1929 a decade after the end of WWI.
Homer & Jethro do theirs a mere three years after being mustered out of WWII, so it's perhaps a bit more fresh on their minds.
October 1948 - King 731 - Blue Tail Fly/All Night Long
Another oldie but questionably goodie folk song first published in 1840 that everybody may be familiar with but never quite took the time to contemplate the meaning of the lyrics. Here a slave is entrusted with shooing flies of his master until the master meets his untimely, but unmourned death when the horse he's riding is bitten by said Blue Tail Fly. It's all so much darker than you thought...
B side is a bit trickier to pin down. I'm not some kind of musicologist I just google really well. But the best I can come up with for "All Night Long" is that it's a rewrite of a much older traditional song as done in 1927 by Burnette & Rutherford.
It's most certainly not at all related to the terrible Lionel Ritchie song from 1983 that may be the first thing to come into most people's tiny minds.
Don't confuse the two. It only leads to madness and death.
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